Space Tether Sightings To Reel In Predawn Skywatchers

Videotapes Of The String

May Net A $1,000 Prize

It's a 5-mile long plastic string attached to a piece of space junk that's circling the earth in a 219-mile-high orbit.

And if the weather cooperates, you should be able to see it on Saturday morning.

At 5:06 a.m.

If you capture it on video, you might even win $1,000.Three weeks ago, NASA unfurled the polyethylene tether from the used part of a Delta rocket. It's part of an experiment to find out whether these long ropes could be used to shift satellites from one orbit to another.

The tether, only 1/32 of an inch thick, is made of the same type of plastic used for grocery and dry-cleaning bags. But because the tether is so long and is extremely reflective of sunlight, you should be able to see it with the naked eye, said engineer Michael Fennell, who helped design the string.

If you are an early riser, you might have seen it between 4:51 and 4:55 this morning. If the skies were clear, the tether should have been visible almost directly overhead in the northwest quandrant of the sky.

It should be visible in almost the same location on Saturday morning between 5:06 and 5:11, said Joe Carroll, founder of Tether Applications, the California company that designed the tether experiment.

Saturday's forecast calls for clear skies in the early morning, said Robert Molleda of the National Weather Service.

The tether will be visible several days next week, but will be most clearly visible during early morning hours on April 7, 8, and 9. It will be visible at night from April 17 to 27, although the specific nighttime viewing times haven't been calculated yet.

"There should be several nights in a row of good viewing for Florida," Carroll said.Most satellites appear as bright dots or points of lights. The tether looks like a line - about 1 1/2 times as tall as the moon - that appears to move as fast as an airplane, Carroll said.

It will move from west to east across the northwest sky. For most of its journey, the tether will be vertical to the horizon.

The tether has been described as looking like a thin, glowing tube hanging in the sky like an upside-down exclamation point.

It was 12 miles long when it was first unfurled. But atomic oxygen and meteorites the size of a grain of sand are slowly eating it up. It's been shortened to about 5 miles, and now Carroll's company cannot monitor it on radar. However, they know exactly where it is in orbit, and you can see it with your naked eye and record it with a video camera.

Carroll knows this because he recorded the tether himself two weeks ago at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

That's where the $1,000 comes in. Videotapes will help Tether Applications determine how well the tether survives and how it interacts with what's left of the atmosphere at that altitude, Carroll said.

So the company needs lots of videos. It has a contest with a $1,000 grand prize and ten $200 second prizes for videos of the tether.

The idea behind the tether is that it could be used cheaply - ten experiments are costing $10 million - to move satellites around in different orbits in space, Carroll said. That's about one-third to one-tenth the cost of using rockets or a space shuttle to do the same job, he said.

A couple of years ago NASA had trouble unfurling an experimental tether from the space shuttle. This experiment, however, is working well, said Bruce Buckingham, a NASA spokesman at the Kennedy Space Center."

There was a long line out there that at certain times was visible," he said.